Windows 10: Dual Boot Windows 10 with Windows 7 or Windows 8

I been trying to comb through post guys but not all the way yet not seen anything on the reverse method install 7-8 on top of existing Windows 10 install. I got my 7 key worked out want to install it, been years since use and was dead key but MS sorted it for me.

I may also install Zorin which is a OS I find intriguing very nice free one.

I just changed to 10 Pro 1607 I have to say despite the data mining of the OS which seems easy enough to turn most off without 3rd party tools is the best OS I have yet to run.

Seen huge increases in performance on
-CPU temps alone 21-25C idle from 8.1 pro 33C normally
-GPU although I have a evga 2gb 960 FTW which destroyed 980ti physics before hand it is operating much more efficient now
-My internet speed increased was always 98.+ MBs up/down been hitting 110-125mbps up/down since 10
and more

Thanks to all for tips and always thank Shawn 7,8,10 forums are the best.

I was wanting to keep 10 on main SSD and operate other OS's from any of those extra drives

Hello OdinSon, and welcome to Ten Forums.

You could pretty much use the same steps in the tutorial to install W7/8 to another drive while having W10 already installed. The only issue is that the boot manager will use the last OS as the default OS to run by default if you don't select one unless changed. In addition, the newer W10 boot UI will not be used. Instead the older W7/8 style boot manager will be used.

Yep Odinson it is and I have it dual booted with 7 on my tester desktop. I have yet to play with it properly being in hospital for a while - broken leg

Have you went to Bio's with it yet?

I found out entering bio's with Zorin it will let you evaluate the OS in that environment and it loads it all, now that is a super sweet feature once I get this dual triple boot stuff set I am going to install on a empty drive and test more the Ultimate pack for 19pounds looks worth every penny so far.

Everywhere I search though for install 8-7 etc with existing 10install returns install 10 with 7-8 etc reversed so has me confused to if you have to install a lower OS then 10 mandatory.

Hope your leg heals well I have T1 crunched, knee blew out again end of work season and pinched lower back nerve thats just the work issues I'm just hitting 37 too, when it rains it pours

10 has the cleanest event log of any OS I have ever had the performance increases are insane my 120gb s300 kingston has passed over 1000mb transfer speeds lol, in 8 would hit 500 over rating but stays way above that in 10 and WD blacks all are 325-500 they are 7200drives

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You could pretty much use the same steps in the tutorial to install W7/8 to another drive while having W10 already installed. The only issue is that the boot manager will use the last OS as the default OS to run by default if you don't select one unless changed. In addition, the newer W10 boot UI will not be used. Instead the older W7/8 style boot manager will be used.

As long as you have a BCD booting active system partition, you can create or add a new volume (i.e. a formatted partition, with assigned drive letter) in Windows 10, and use the Windows 7 or 8 setup ISO \sources install.wim or install.esd to apply the Windows 7 or 8 image to that partition.

The imagex /apply install.wim 1 T: process is quick and simple where T: is the Target drive, and only needs to be followed up by Bcdboot T:\windows from the commandline to add the installation to the bootmenu.

There are no checks or any interference between the different filesystems - you don't need to swap out disks, and each of the systems can see the others - of course, you can use disk management to hide one system from another if needed.

Of course, the Windows 7 or 8 installations will need to be activated individually by product key after or during the OOBE, depending on the version. There is no digital license nonsense before 10!

If Zorin can be installed on an NTFS partition, and I think it can, then you can use Mint4win* (Mint 15) or ubuntu's WUBI (12.04) to install the basic grub installer for linux under windows, but change the Mint or Ubuntu boot and installation files to the ones with the exact same names from the zorin isofile see:

I have found it works fine, until you have to repair Windows, and it wipes out the linux grub chainloader, so you need to back up the BCD and boot files for such an incident.

*Mint4win from the Mint 15 iso seems a little more reliable than WUBI, although thy are both based on the same WUBI program

My Compaq laptop from August 2012, when it had a £15 upgrade from Windows 7 to 8 (MCE) then to 8.1and then as a 10 insider has had linux mint (Maya, I think) installed this way under windows 8 since the end of 2012, and it is still fine.

Last edited by Fafhrd; 03 Feb 2017 at 21:23.

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I will eventually that is get around to seeing that finally long overdue clean install of 7 Ultimate once again on the now for almost two years second OS drive and then likely opt to use a 3rd party if not BCD Editor to get that fresh 7 added into the 10 Pro boot options. First I simply unplug the 10 to keep each drive isolated which allows each to stand alone as the preferred dual boot option while the 10 drive will remain the default boot drive. Af this point I mainly boot into 7 Pro on the second remote pc which allows for WiFi portability since the 10 side of the dual boot there won't connect by WiFi to the router! The compact NZXT Vulcan case was originally intended to be a portable case to carry from room to room in order to look things up when asked to look at someone else's laptop if not desktop brought to me. I get requests at all times of day and night.

For Zorin or another other OS you want to check out without interference with any Windows install the option to run the other guy's OS would be on a VM either the Hyper-V option now seen in 10 or with a 3rd party program like VMware's VMStation Player. That of course allows a list of OSs including temp Windows installs to get ideas before making changes on the drive(s) in use. You simply wouldn't be able to see any dual boot set up there however while VCDs can still be added as secondary drives in the Windows boot loader with a little work.

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I found that I was getting supposed internet connection, but no pages showed up, because my router is not correctly configured in firmware to handle IPv6, so it was routing to a null IPv6 address. Once just the old IPv4 was on the local network system, connectivity has not dropped. Recent builds of Windows use IPv6 preferentially. I don't use Homegroups or link local... or network discovery, just plain old IPv4 and all seems to work like it used to!

Last edited by Fafhrd; 04 Feb 2017 at 12:47.
Reason: fixed link

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As long as you have a BCD booting active system partition, you can create or add a new volume (i.e. a formatted partition, with assigned drive letter) in Windows 10, and use the Windows 7 or 8 setup ISO \sources install.wim or install.esd to apply the Windows 7 or 8 image to that partition.

The imagex /apply install.wim 1 T: process is quick and simple where T: is the Target drive, and only needs to be followed up by Bcdboot T:\windows from the commandline to add the installation to the bootmenu.

There are no checks or any interference between the different filesystems - you don't need to swap out disks, and each of the systems can see the others - of course, you can use disk management to hide one system from another if needed.

Of course, the Windows 7 or 8 installations will need to be activated individually by product key after or during the OOBE, depending on the version. There is no digital license nonsense before 10!

If Zorin can be installed on an NTFS partition, and I think it can, then you can use Mint4win* (Mint 15) or ubuntu's WUBI (12.04) to install the basic grub installer for linux under windows, but change the Mint or Ubuntu boot and installation files to the ones with the exact same names from the zorin isofile see:

I have found it works fine, until you have to repair Windows, and it wipes out the linux grub chainloader, so you need to back up the BCD and boot files for such an incident.

*Mint4win from the Mint 15 iso seems a little more reliable than WUBI, although thy are both based on the same WUBI program

My Compaq laptop from August 2012, when it had a £15 upgrade from Windows 7 to 8 (MCE) then to 8.1and then as a 10 insider has had linux mint (Maya, I think) installed this way under windows 8 since the end of 2012, and it is still fine.

I have never studied this method actually heard of it but never looked into it till past month, I spent way to much time working tryign to get some gaming hours in over the years, if not that was coding doing theme design for PHP Nuke platforms.

I am bumfuzzled right now I cannot get a second install with drives connected or disconnected now keep in mind been a few good years since I went dual boot, and way to much has went on to remember sad I know but I know how I use to do it.

Either way connected or not I am getting small spinup of my disk image I do not have USB stick sadly, got high performance mem cards and reader lol and they will run installs I have tried.

But I keep getting spinup then pushed into my bio's because of no read media or start to read the a failure for no drivers, I insert disk and no drivers work. This is first I have seen of that and boy do I feel like I'm tossed back a few grades cannot shake the dust off have spent my Friday night to sat morning trying to figure this out lol

I'm looking for command lines on deploying the wim I have toolkit from link you supplied will be reading up I seriously doubt you are on forums this early lol

Thanks to all I will be active as possible love these forums and learning curves to gain knowledge.

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Early and late, and my wife complains I fall asleep in front of the TV broadcasting the same old drivel. Its my snoring that she objects to most, she says. I need to drown out the TV so I can fall asleep, so I can stay awake at night, playing in peace with the PCs I suppose

The first thing with multibooting troubleshooting is to identify the drive with the active partition is the same one that is the first boot option in BIOS and only one Active partition per PC is a good rule, which is why I don't swap drives, if I ever do move a drive from one PC to another, it leads to madness!

If that's difficult, just remove all but one drive, on a single connection to the motherboard, usually sata these days, and set the BIOS to boot from that. I was born too close to the bronze age to have come to terms with UEFI and GPT - legacy MBR is what dual booting is all about, since some OS you may want to include is also ignorant of modern EFI BIOS methods. Then you can swap HDDs onto the same cable connector until you find a booting candidate - you may need to enter the boot menu between each disk swap so that the settings can be saved. After that you can add other HDDs to the system. I now have a selection of 500GB disks from old SKY + HD Set top boxes (cost me nothing) which contain a library of systems installed on them.

It's always wise to have some other media to boot the PC with - a live linux CD, or a WinPE with a graphical interface is good. Even a Windows 7 setup disk is better than nothing. Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk is a great system on a USB stick or DVD to have - you almost don't need Windows 10!

A windows to go USB is even better - I have a windows 8.0 CP (consumer preview) Sandisk 16GB USB, which times out after a couple of hours since it is long expired, but it's lovely to use on almost any system I plug it into - and I know to set the BIOS to boot from the hard disk called Sandisk Cruzer.

Once you have an active system drive with Bootloader, bootmanager and the BCD store on it you are set to go. I consider the installation that it boots up to as a "Technician" PC, and all others booting from the menu are individual lab PCs.

I'd create a 30GB partition for a windows 10 installation , 20 for 8, and perhaps 15 for 7, 10 for XP and so on - slightly larger for 64-bit installs. They may be imaged, compressed, transferred and expanded later, as needed, or converted to VHD (or other virtual disk type) files if you are fond of highly transportable single-file OS containers, or wish to use them in VMs.
I'll stop here, I'm sure you have plenty to digest, and some questions for later.

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Early and late, and my wife complains I fall asleep in front of the TV broadcasting the same old drivel. Its my snoring that she objects to most, she says. I need to drown out the TV so I can fall asleep, so I can stay awake at night, playing in peace with the PCs I suppose

The first thing with multibooting troubleshooting is to identify the drive with the active partition is the same one that is the first boot option in BIOS and only one Active partition per PC is a good rule, which is why I don't swap drives, if I ever do move a drive from one PC to another, it leads to madness!

If that's difficult, just remove all but one drive, on a single connection to the motherboard, usually sata these days, and set the BIOS to boot from that. I was born too close to the bronze age to have come to terms with UEFI and GPT - legacy MBR is what dual booting is all about, since some OS you may want to include is also ignorant of modern EFI BIOS methods. Then you can swap HDDs onto the same cable connector until you find a booting candidate - you may need to enter the boot menu between each disk swap so that the settings can be saved. After that you can add other HDDs to the system. I now have a selection of 500GB disks from old SKY + HD Set top boxes (cost me nothing) which contain a library of systems installed on them.

It's always wise to have some other media to boot the PC with - a live linux CD, or a WinPE with a graphical interface is good. Even a Windows 7 setup disk is better than nothing. Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk is a great system on a USB stick or DVD to have - you almost don't need Windows 10!

A windows to go USB is even better - I have a windows 8.0 CP (consumer preview) Sandisk 16GB USB, which times out after a couple of hours since it is long expired, but it's lovely to use on almost any system I plug it into - and I know to set the BIOS to boot from the hard disk called Sandisk Cruzer.

Once you have an active system drive with Bootloader, bootmanager and the BCD store on it you are set to go. I consider the installation that it boots up to as a "Technician" PC, and all others booting from the menu are individual lab PCs.

I'd create a 30GB partition for a windows 10 installation , 20 for 8, and perhaps 15 for 7, 10 for XP and so on - slightly larger for 64-bit installs. They may be imaged, compressed, transferred and expanded later, as needed, or converted to VHD (or other virtual disk type) files if you are fond of highly transportable single-file OS containers, or wish to use them in VMs.
I'll stop here, I'm sure you have plenty to digest, and some questions for later.

TY for the welcome

My eyes are toast lol

This is actually a old drive but new to the port I had 5 in use decide what the heck move a old one in there put my 7 on it and tinker with stacked install multi-boots my 0 drive is my SSD of course I have always kept it strictly main OS

I been taking a break since post getting a visual on some of the commands in action was watching BT's video on few parts of it. I think if I'm going to put 8 on with the rest for eval/testing is a disconnect and move to 0 for that old HDD nothing else worked I did try 6thru3 no go so I think it must be move to 0 possibly but what do I know ha if I did would of wrapped it up in 30 instead of a all nighter. But I like learning the hard way it sinks the info in you deeper it seems, I did the same with coding Nuke platforms self taught myself and it paid well.

I did have those recovery tools from 2 nights ago I must have closed my browser before they finished downloading not seeing them in file drive. There is a ton of things I am lacking on need to get up to speed on. I'm good on the Virus/Malware removal, most stock OEM machine repair if someone needs me to help them. Excellent rig builder love to build some high perf. PCs.

But as far as the dism / esd imaging and even PE boot environment I am in the trenches, but once I cannot figure something out I will be stuck on it till I do lol.

IWhen testing sata ports 6-3 I was enabling / disabling in bios as well other drives. I even went UEFI to Legacy > fast boot on/off > numerous configs no go every attemp lead to needing driver and nothing I had implemented them on load not MB disc, or any intel drivers I had on usb storage. I am almost debating putting it in my HDD dock and trying from there. I have done installs from dock before. But easy to forget stuff working normal hours then go into a field where your working 7days a week minimum of 110hrs a week all year you lose reality and become a robot just about.

I bet in the end like you say it may come down to GPT which is what I have been using GPT format with empty ntfs which needs to MBR matter of fact thinking this will be first thing I do when I pull power to drives but while I got that side off time to do some ordering and label my cables I will jump back on when I get some results

Thank You all

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I installed the 10 tech preview along side my win 7 ultimate, I reinstalled, the Windows 7 side of the HDD because after however many years the OS had a LOT of clutter, and even though windows update was a nightmare I finally got all the updates...

I remember seeing some stuff about how Windows 10 would wipe all other partitions, so I'm just wondering if that's still a problem. :sarc:
And if so, can you select which partition to install on? ( I'd assume definitely so, but.. )

Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone else is having issues with running windows 10 through boot camp on mac os x? I currently am experiencing glitchy display images as well as not being able to use the search bar next to the windows start menu.

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